Imperial Earth

The experience brought home to him, as nothing else had yet done, the sheer immensity of space. The Solar System, he began to suspect, was not designed for the convenience of Man, and that presumptuous creature’s attempts to use it for his own advantage would often be foiled by laws beyond his control. All his life, Duncan had assumed without question that he could speak to friends or family instantly, wherever he might be. Yet now-before he had even passed Saturn’s outer

moons!-that power had been taken from him. For the next twenty days, he would share a lonely, isolated bubble of humanity, able to interact with his fellow passengers, but cut off from all real contact with the rest of mankind.

His self-pity lasted only a few moments. There was also an exhilaration—even a freedom-in this sense of isolation, and in the knowledge that he was setting forth on one of the longest and swiftest voyages that any man could make. Travel to the outer planets was routine and uneventful-but it was also rare, and only a very small fraction of the human race would ever experience it. Duncan remembered a favorite Terran phrase of Malcolm’s, usually employed in a different context, but sound advice for every occasion: “When it’s inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” He would do his best to enjoy this voyage.

Yet Duncan was exhausted when he finally climbed into his bunk at the end of his first day in space. The strain of innumerable farewells, not only to his family but to countless friends, had left him emotionally drained. On top of this, there were all the nagging worries of departure: What had he forgotten to do? What vital necessities had he failed to pack? Had all his baggage been safely loaded and stowed? What essential good-byes had he overlooked? It was useless worrying about these matters now that he was speeding away from home at a velocity increasing by twenty-five thousand kilometers an hour, every hour, yet he could not help doing so. Tired though he was, his hyperactive brain would not let him sleep.

It takes real genius to make a bed that can be uncomfortable at a fifth of a gravity, and luckily the designers of Sirius had not accepted this challenging assignment. After thirty minutes or so, Duncan began to relax and to get his racing thoughts in order. He prided himself on being able to sleep without artificial aids, and it looked as if he would be able to dispense with electro narcosis after all. That was, of course, supposed to be completely harmless, but he never felt pronerly awake the next day.

You’re’falling asleep, he told himself. You won’t know anything more until it’s time for breakfast. All your dreams are going to be happy

ones…. A sound like a small volcano clearing its throat undid the good work of the last ten minutes. He was instantly wide awake, wondering what disaster had befallen Sirius. Not until several anxious seconds had passed did he realize that some antisocial shipmate had found it necessary to visit the adjacent toilet.

Cursing, he tried to recapture the broken mood and to return to the threshold of sleep. But it was useless; the myriad voices of the ship had started to clamor for his attention. He seemed to have lost control of the analytical portion of his brain, and it was busy classifying all the noises from the surrounding universe.

It had been hours since he had really noticed the far-off, ghostly whistling of the drive. Every second Sirius was ejecting a hundred grams of hydrogen at a third of the velocity of light-a trifling loss of mass, yet it represented meaningless millions of gigawatts. During the first few centuries of the Industrial Revolution, all the factories of Earth could not have matched the power that was now driving him sunward.

That incongruously faint and feeble scream was not really disturbing, but it was overlaid with all. sorts of other peculiar sounds. What could possibly cause the “Buzz… click, click … buzz,” the soft “thump … thump … thump,” the “gurgle, hissssss,” and the intermittent “whee-wheee-whee” which was the most maddening of all?

Duncan rolled over and tried to bury. his head in the pillows. It made no difference, except that the higher-pitched sounds got filtered out and the lower frequencies were enhanced. He also became more aware of the steady pulsation of the bed itself, at just about the ten cycles per second nicely calculated to produce epileptic fits.

Hello, that was something new. It was a kind of dispirited kerplunk, kerplunk, kerplunk” that might have been produced by an ancient internal combustion engine in the last stages of decrepitude. Somehow, Duncan seriously doubted that i.c. engines, old or new, were to be found aboard